wanna help??

[carrbowl]

Well I don't think I've had such a challenge in the photoshop area. The skin tones are challenging in this shoot. This is one of them...there are more people in other photos, but maybe if you can help me and tell me what you think I should do, I can fix all the others. The redness in the face really bothers me...there is no warmness to the photo in my opinion...

[Concisus Cognatus]

Hi Renae,
This is a quick and dirty example of a "curves" adjustment of the RGB to give it a warmer tone. Not sure it's what you were referring to. I'll remove if you don't like it.

[carrbowl]

well I guess the problem with this is, if you warm up the photo, it increases the redness in both of their faces, which is exactly what I was trying to tone down.

I don't like to photoshop it so much that it doesn't look like them, I know I need to keep some red in the face..

[Concisus Cognatus]

I see. I'm not well-enough versed in PS to do selective stuff like what you're wanting. I think I'll go play with it and see what falls outta the bag.

BTW, good morning.

[carrbowl]

Well, the brain must not be awake yet!! The first shot is the one I already did some processing to...this is straight out of the camera....

[JohnT]

To get rid of (or at least reduce) face redness, mask each face then use Levels to adjust reds on the Red channel.

[Concisus Cognatus]

Hmmm, I'm probably missing whatever subtle changes were made. I only notice the first image was the cropped one.

[carrbowl]

Well......for starters how about the stiches in the head being removed??? Richard, you better go have some more coffee!!!

Seriously though...there isn't much difference...thus my point...I don't know what to do!!!! There is another photo, with 4 people in it...

Unfortunately John is probably right...I'm going to have to do each face individually....UGH!!!!

[rott]

Originally Posted by carrbowl

Unfortunately John is probably right...I'm going to have to do each face individually....UGH!!!!

That's what it looks like to me too. The gentleman is quite a bit more red that the woman. It's not so hard to do though. In photoshop, just draw a selection around his face, feather it by 10 pixels or so, create new layer via copy and work on that layer to drop the redness. Or you can use an adjustment layer, curves, selective color, whatever...and mask out his face using the same technique (select, feather, fill black outside the selection and white inside on the mask).

[carrbowl]

So Mike, you don't think I need to be exact when I mask out the face?? That wouldn't be so bad then..

[d2creative]

Create a duplicate layer, make the overall color adjustments, then create a layer mask on that second layer and paint over the skin areas revealing the original skin tones on the layer below. Use a big brush so that the transition is soft.

[rott]

Originally Posted by carrbowl

So Mike, you don't think I need to be exact when I mask out the face?? That wouldn't be so bad then..

Nah, I don't think you need to be exact. You're dropping some red only, not adjusting contrast or brightness. If you look around the edge of his face, where your selection line would be, there's hardly any red... so if that's the only thing you adjust, it won't affect the areas near your selection lines, and thus won't look funky. Your adjustment should be subtle anyway. Make sense?

In fact, I might even "grow" the selection by a few pixels after selecting his face before I feathered it. There's much less red in the areas around him; grass, his shirt, her shirt, tree.

[carrbowl]

thanks guys for the suggestions...they are working...

[Donb10]

I added a little warmth to the photo by converting to LAB mode and adjusted the colors. I then used the "quick mask" feature to isolate the man's face, used a levels adjustment and removed some of the red. More red could be removed, but judging by the fact that this man's skin tone is very light and the fact that his beard color appears to be red, removing to much red might make him appear unnatural to people who know him.

Good luck...........

[Duffy Pratt]

There isn't really a need for selections here. The guy's t-shirt, and all the rest of the picture, are too blue. In LAB, the t-shirt, which should be pure white, is measuring -10 in the B channel. The problem with the faces is not that they are too red, but that they don't have enough compensating yellow.

Here's what I did -- took about 3 minutes: 1) Converted to LAB. 2) Created a curves adjustment layer. 3) Adjusted B curve so the midpoint was pushed 10 points to yellow, endpoints moved to make it a straight line, so the whole picture got pushed toward yellow.
4) Wrote a quick curve on the L channel to increase contrast some. 5) Flattened and created a new layer. To punch up the colors, I then applied the A channel to itself and the B channel to itself in overlay mode, and dialed the opacity of the new layer to 20%. 6) Applied unsharp mask to the L channel at something like (80, 1, 0). 7) Convert to sRGB and saved to .jpg.

There are probably other ways to arrive at a similar result. I don't claim that what I've done here is perfect. But I think it at least shows that the picture doesn't need any selections to get the skin colors reasonable.

Duffy